Off my back porch

Down Kellogg Street

Up Kellogg Street

My house, our cars

Winter 2010

Summer!

Monday, May 30, 2011

that my father, Vincent Murphy, went to sign up to fight in WWII and was turned down . . . the first time. He was told to go home and take care of his mother, something he'd been doing since he was 13 when his father died. But my father went back and signed up again, and at the age of 32 went into the US Army. Why? He told me "all my pals were doing it."
That in a nutshell was my father, never one to toot his own horn. But he was able to say to say such things because the larger issue, would he fight for his country, was never in doubt. Things like that were just that clear to him.
And so today I am thinking of him and his pals and all of those who deserve our remembrance. Odd that we say "Happy Memorial Day," isn't it?
MNYAGG

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Thanks Jess, for stepping up to the plate. What a great piece! A tannery, huh? Only in CNY. I'll be excited to see (hint hint) if anybody else steps up to the plate. Remember my pieces are all unfinished, but I'm putting up what I have as soon as somebody else puts something up. And my goal is to write more description, so every piece will at least begin with description before I launch into my usual self centered narrative. So here's my next installment:

McCall: McCall, Idaho sits at the top of the world, or so it seems sometimes. At over 5,500 ft. elevation, it’s not a place where too many summer gardens grow. Once I sat in my brother’s friend’s living room and listened to “the boys” talk about how once they saw snow on June 23rd. I didn’t know then how much a place could do to you. The Tamaracks that grow so straight because there’s really not enough room for them, the jumping into Payette Lake on May Day even though the water was not too long ago ice.

I suppose McCall is where I grew up, after running away from New Jersey and all my teenage angst. It seemed at first like time had not, would not, touch the place. In high school the kids couldn’t understand my accent; fresh from Bergenfield I probably sounded like I was talking under water to them. In McCall I learned to call a bag a sack, a potato a spud. I learned about isolation and that people in small towns can think enormously wrong things of you – until they get to know you.

1977: at my high school graduation party I look over to see my family standing, mouths agape, around my school principal who has just told them all how proud everybody is that I graduated with my class after dropping out of high school in my junior year. Quite a frozen-in-time moment, considering that my mother, father and sister where the only ones who knew until that moment that I had left school, that I had been a rudderless, woebegone kid who didn’t know what to do because nobody liked her, and who had walked away from school and spent a year working at a fish hatchery waiting to get on with it.

You can’t imagine what the air felt like to me when I first moved to McCall. I came from 80 ft. above sea level, from a place where on certain days you could smell ocean brine. The air in McCall was a sword at first, jousting with my poor asthmatic lungs. I felt like it dared me to breath. I couldn’t walk ten feet without the eerie feeling of needing something that wasn’t there. But somewhere along the way that gave way to the feeling that this was right, this living so high and close to such clear blue sky.

When you see the tips of Ponderosa pines look like they’re trying to make a mark on a big sky you know why people can love a place, really love a place in a way that almost hurts sometimes. The East was worn out I thought, had been used up by its own excess. In my high school journalism class I wrote an impassioned plea, a manifesto of sorts to what my homeland could have been. It was intended as some clarion call, a sort of “don’t let this happen to THE WEST” tirade against sitting idly by while the place you love goes to hell in a hand basket .

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Pocatello sits in a gash that runs west/east through the eastern part of the southern part of the state of Idaho. Technically a gap, in places around the city of Pocatello the landscape looks like it was hacked out, made into something it wasn’t meant to be. Sourtheast Idaho is not hospitable looking; mostly treeless mountains ring the city of Pocatello in one way or another. The high mountain desert is formidable, stern looking when seen from the lower elevation of Pocatello’s downtown. The scrubby juniper and sage and rabbit brush don’t beckon “welcome”. But the people do.

1999: We’re in the state car driving back from Idaho Falls’ outreach campus to the main campus of Idaho State University. Of the four of us in the car, only two of us know that the driver is in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Terry knows, I know; I’m the driver. The two others, visiting assistant professors we carpool with twice a week, probably just think I’m weird.

There’s a place on I-15 where you crest a hill and see the Portneuf Gap just as you’re coming into Pocatello. And it is there where Terry leans over and whispers “beautiful, isn’t it?” Comic relief at a time when I was afraid to take the responsibility of driving anyone anywhere. When I was coming undone.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

My new mantra. I was leaving D's house this morning, and in my head a little voice wanted to complain about all the wiggly thwigs (my neologism, I hope) the trees had left on my car -- all over my car to be precise. I know that little voice and how even though it can start softly it can, if left unchecked, turn into the heckler in my head. I'm talking about my tendency to become depressed.

Depressed in summer, to be more precise. Case(s) in point, the last two summers: first the summer of no promotion, then the summer of dad's death. Before summer depression number three hits, I thought I'd set myself a few ground rules.

1) I have a schedule: morning work on online class and/or fall classes, afternoon dig, plant, weed. You guessed it; I'm doing another feeble attempt at gardening. Some time in the day I read about service learning in tech and professional writing classes.

2) I have a plan that involves you, my beloved blog followers. Are you listening? Getting excited? Wait, do I have blog followers? I'm going to write posts about the places I've lived, the people I knew in those places, you know the whole literary thing. Now I haven't lived in that many places, but I'm not going to aim for finished pieces; instead I'll start a piece on, let's say Pocatello on a Tuesday then next I might write about Bergenfield, then back to Pocatello or throw a little McCall in the mix.
Here's the challenge:
If you're out there reading my blog, why don't you post a little somethin somethin in the comment section about some place you've lived? When I post, you post. Get it? Just do it, and who knows what'll happen?

3) I said I would devote the summer to my back and it has begun. I got a letter from my insurance company yesterday saying the caudal epidural injection had been approved. So on Monday (I needed a day to think about all this) I'll call to set up the procedure. There are no guarantees that this means I'll avoid back surgery, but it's a start, and frankly I'm sick of being in pain all the time. I'd rather inflict it than have it; just ask my students (bah dump . . . ).

So that's it for now, time to finish putting up the online class that opens Monday.
Will you take my challenge?
MNYAGG

Friday, May 20, 2011

I think that's a fair enough question. Summer will likely not come to CNY this year because I bought a 12,000 BTU air conditioner, yo. It weighs almost 70 lbs and will likely rip the window I put it in off the house.

Oh but I won't have to worry about that, will I? Who needs ac when temps are in the 60's? We'll all be pasty here in CNY if this keeps up, pastier than usual.

What's the weather like where you are? Is summer coming in all its splendor?
MNYAGG

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Google tells me that song is by The Three Degrees, a one hit wonder of sorts. That's how I feel about you blog. When will we have a chance to sit down and catch up? The answer is when my grading's done. Until then . . .
Happy Spring to my faithful follower(s),
MNYAGG